A mobile device requires the establishment of a radio access bearer in order to communicate with the wireless network infrastructure. Furthermore, some devices allow the establishment of multiple radio access bearers for communication. In one instance, multiple radio access bearers can be dependent on the device requiring multiple (PDP) contexts. Thus, for example, a device may have a propriety PDP context for the manufacturer of the device, a general wireless application protocol (WAP) context for browsing, a multi-media messaging service (MMS) PDP context for MMS applications, a streaming media PDP context for streaming media applications, among others. As will be appreciated, a PDP context is a term that is generally referred to in the third generation partnership project (3GPP) and more generally, the term “tunnel” is used herein to refer to a data connection to a particular network.
The establishment of a connection may fail for a variety of reasons. For example, the network may indicate that a particular data connection is not allowed in the current network area. However, user-level applications may not know how to interpret this information and have little knowledge of when a data connection can or cannot be established. An application or client may thus initiate a data connection process continually, even on data connections which are known to fail.